Chapter 1: Introduction – The Challenges of Higher Education

Never before in human history, the scientific, technological and socio-economic pace was so abrupt. Artificial Intelligence, wearable technologies, the Internet of places (Metaverse), robotics, pandemics, and climate change, just to name a few, cause immense turbulences in the form of an overarching tsunami in all walks of life. Higher education institutions confront a variety of challenges. This chapter briefly presents the priorities in Higher Education (HE), discusses the context of the iPEAR project and the book’s outline.

Especially after the pandemic, reflections led to different perspectives in HE. Educationalist Alexandra Mihai suggests rethinking our priorities as lifelong learners and educators. She summarises her article with five recommendations to brainstorm:

• Noticing the impact of change is a radical act of critical thinking. We must notice how technologies change, young people learn, and educators unlearn or re-learn to adapt quickly.
• An act of resistance against distractions. Reclaiming our students’ attention lost in the never-ending notifications and fighting against fake information is crucial. Students and educators could think of a manifesto of resistance against the manipulation algorithms and the never-ending influx of unwanted information.
• An act of choice among the myriad things that require our attention. Offering options for learning may be a way to help students design as co-creators, a more self-directed professional path through networked communities (networked learning) and peer instruction.
• An act of reclaiming our time and mental space. We need to design task that allows people time to work without stress and cognitive overload within their proximal level of difficulty with support from peers, mentors and online resources or artificial intelligence.
• An act of awakening our senses and curiosity. Our students deserve more experiential and discovery learning that stimulates their senses and interest to engage in more profound understanding.

As educators, teachers, professors or mentors, we must reconsider what we educate our students for. How could we make higher education motivational, engaging and empowering? We can hardly catch up with online courses, resources, tools, and information. Consequently, cognitive overload and misinformation threaten our well-being (Themelis & Sime, 2020), and the changeable landscape of pedagogies in Higher Education makes strategic plans obsolete at the speed of light. Students on the other side of the spectrum feel disengaged, and the learning objectives seem descriptive and often unrelated to their needs and preferences.

More and more research proves that social learning (learning with peers) makes students happier, smarter and better performers (Themelis, 2022). In the frame of Connectivism (Downes, 2022), “knowledge is the organization of connections in a network.” Connecting people on equitable relations makes peer learning inclusive, allowing the sharing of values, content and tools while working together (Frank, 2020). Inclusion is a crucial concept for the project. Working with all the members, the United Nations created the vision of 17 sustainable goals for every field of life that aim to achieve by 2030. The United Nations’ Goal 4: Quality education emphasises inclusive and equitable education, defining it as:

…a process of systemic reform embodying changes and modifications in content, teaching methods, approaches, structures and strategies in education to overcome barriers with a vision serving to provide all students of the relevant age range with an equitable and participatory learning experience and environment that best corresponds to their requirements and preferences (CRPD, 2016, paragraph 11).

During the pandemic, peer support was the best antidote again social alienation and depression. Our peers (colleagues and students) offer alternatives for learning online during lockdowns and share constructive feedback. Equally important, peer instruction proved more effective than lectures (Mazur, 1997). In addition, the power of social contagion (peer-to-peer learning) undoubtedly assists behavioural change (Frank, 2020) associated with learning. The respect of colleagues/students acts as a significant reward for people more influential than monetary rewards (Pentland, 2014) that could help students and educators understand that the ‘Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts’ in education (Christakis and Fowler, 2009). Research findings from MIT lab (Social Physics, Pentland, 2014) have provided significant evidence that performance improves more with collaboration rather than with individual talent.

On the other hand, technology has the potential to enhance learning, making the process easier engaging and always offering surprise elements. Augmentation (AR) is a portal where experiential learning, visualisation and creativity bloom. Neither peer learning nor augmented reality provides an ideal arena without challenges and perils. The TEL pedagogy must address the pros, cons and contextual factors that could facilitate the teaching repertoire.

The iPEAR is an approach toward life-long learning with the help of peers/colleagues, online followers and resources, using technologies to make the process user-friendly, visual and pleasant so that content and skill emerge efficiently.

As an intellectual output of the iPEAR project, the book aims to facilitate the design of instructional tasks that stimulate interest and engage students with augmented reality technologies as a collective inquiry. The literature reviews, research findings and case studies could map the landscape of a different TEL pedagogy that envisions democratic, visual and creative learning with peers.

The book is divided into six chapters. The introduction presents some of the challenges of Higher Education (HE) and addresses the iPEAR point of view. Chapter 2 focuses on peer learning pros, cons, and contextual factors in Higher education, forming a narrative of the approach. Chapter 3 is a semi-systematic literature review offering an eagle’s view on augmentation pros, cons and contextual factors in Higher education. Chapter 4 explains the iPEAR research rationale, findings and case studies that could serve as examples for educators to implement in their professional praxis. Chapter 5 describes in detail the elements of the pedagogical framework and offers a practical checklist to think over when designing iPEAR assignments. Chapter 6 evaluates the project’s intellectual outputs and speculates on future steps in the light of Artificial intelligence. The Appendices include the research questionnaires, assessment framework, and tools for the educators to assess their understanding of the iPEAR rationale, especially their digital skills.